A new language

This is my history. It is the blood of those first human explorers that runs through my veins.

It joins in me, too, with the blood of the Europeans.

What is part of me, is part of us all. It comes from this place.

The psychologist, Carl Jung, pondered the nature of the spirit of land; what he saw as a sacred thing.

"Land assimilates the conqueror," he said.

Two peoples here; two stories, two rivers, that meet.

As Cook patched up his stricken Endeavour he spent more than a month on the land of the Guugu Yimithirr.

Here one of the crew saw an odd animal: what was it, he asked. Ganguru.

He wrote it down as kangaroo.

A new word had entered English; a distinctively Australian word; a new language born on this soil.

There has been much discussion this week about another word: discovery.

A statue of Cook in Sydney's Hyde Park maintains that he "discovered this territory 1770".

I have questioned that, prompted to look at how we grapple with our history by America's violent struggle with its own.

Statues there — reminders of a racist past — are being pulled down.

I have never advocated the same here, but should we look upon his statue in silence, should our history be met with the shrug of indifference.

For me that is impossible.

Discovery is not merely a word, in Cook's time it was a doctrine.

From the 15th century it had been used by the empires of Europe to justify seizing the land of indigenous peoples.

Together with the doctrine of Terra Nullius — empty land — the rights of the First Peoples of this land were extinguished.

These doctrines are obsolete, our High Court in the Mabo decision acknowledged Native Title; that the peoples here at the time of Cook had and continue to possess a traditional and enduring legal right to their land.

The judges made it clear that this was not just a matter of law but a matter of history; it spoke to the soul of the nation.

Writing in their judgments Justices Deane and Gaudron characterised dispossession as a "legacy of unutterable shame".

"The nation as a whole must remain diminished unless and until there is an acknowledgment of and a retreat from those past injustices," they wrote.

The debate this week — 25 years after the Mabo decision — reminds us that the struggle for acknowledgment and a full reckoning remains unfinished.

Statues, plaques, inscriptions — these are symbols.

They are important because they tell us who we have been, they illustrate our story. But a nation is us; it is people.

"Issues of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and Indigeneity are all considered as factors that both shape how people experience being Australian and also shape the capacity of people to participate in formal venues where Australian-ness is produced."

Professor of Cultural Studies at Curtin University, Sevendrini Perera, has written of how whiteness in Australia has established a "hierarchy of belonging and entitlement".

Australian identity for many people remains one of contingency and ambivalence.

For Indigenous peoples shaped by conquest, colonisation and segregation; defined and re-defined by the state, Australian allegiance can be fraught.

Yet generations of Indigenous people have struggled for a way in; have balanced the legacy of a painful history with the need to make peace.

This year in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Indigenous people spoke of the unbreakable link to this land.

"This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty," it said.

It reminded Australia that Indigenous sovereignty has never been ceded but co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

"How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty Millenia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?"

These are the words of a people who have fought for survival.

The statement calls for an Indigenous voice in our Constitution, a document written more than a century ago specifically to exclude us.

Australians soon may be asked to vote yes.

I return to the words of Cook, stricken on the Great Barrier Reef.

The place where he had first struck peril he called Cape Tribulation.

He had feared the worst, yet had come through and he passed two small islands which at the height of his distress he had resigned himself to never reaching.

In his journal he wrote, "They had been the object of our hope, or perhaps rather our wishes, and therefore I called them HOPE ISLANDS."

We can still debate whether Captain Cook "discovered" this land — such debates are essential and hopefully elevated above hysteria and mocking — but reading Cook's words I can't help think he did put us on a journey between tribulation and hope.